Am in Japan. Using toilets with “wash spray” and “Bidet” function.
Since women wipe front to back to attempt avoiding increased bacteria in the lower vaginal opening, I am wondering how women can use these toilets.
Seems to me that forceful spray upwards and forwards defeats the idea of trying to keep the two areas clean and separate and instead would force bacteria forwards and upwards into the vaginal area.
How do women use these and avoid rampant UTI’s, problems, etc ?
Cartooniverse
You’re supposed to wipe after having a bowel movement and before using the bidet, so there are a minimum amount of fecal bacteria left to be spread around. And human urine is sterile. So we’re not talking about a lot of bacteria here.
Your vagina doesn’t normally gape open like the looming end of an outflow pipe, the folds of the labia closing it off more or less, depending on the woman, so you’d have to deliberately squat, spread your legs, and open wide a la Porn in order to force the spray of water up in there. And the labia, even after multiple births, normally do a pretty good job of closing off the vagina to outside substances, which is why you can skinny-dip in a lake without bacteria and other single-celled thingies (rotifers?) getting in.
You can start the spray of water up at your clitoris, or over to the side of the labia, and allow it to flow down over your vaginal area. You don’t necessarily squat so as to have the jet squirting straight up and “into”, IOW.
Thanks.
Rotifers are multicellular (though microscopic), FYI.
Hmm, I wonder if this is true (about wiping first), based on personal experience. I have tried two toilets so equipped in Japan. One was in a hotel and the water stream was so weak as to be worse than useless, so I didn’t use it (this might have been adjustable, but I couldn’t read whatever instructions might have been there). The other, in a private home, had a much stronger stream, and of warm water, so it was quite pleasant to use instead of toilet paper. Or rather, I used toilet paper to dry the water rather than waiting for the blow dryer to work.
Now, I didn’t have any instructions, and I couldn’t read whatever was printed on the controls, so maybe I was doing it wrong. But I got very very clean this way, and I would have seen no reason to wipe first, before the water.
Now as to the OP, I sort of got from the stick figure drawings that a woman urinating would use one setting (focused on the front) while anyone doing BMs would use the other setting (focused on the rear). And the nozzle focused on the rear did not move around; the nozzle swung out, and then it commenced to shoot out water in just one position (and I had to shift my position around a little bit so all areas were attended to). So I don’t see that there would have been a problem shooting stray fecal matter into an area where I didn’t want it to go.
Unfortunately, I don’t know a single Japanese woman on either side of the ocean whom I could concieve of asking about this.
Roddy
I was always told you wipe first.
Rotifers, yeah, thanks; I couldn’t remember offhand the names of those microscopic thingies they’re always having you look at under the microscope in 6th grade biology class, so I threw “rotifers” in there.
I saw a Modern Marvels segment on the History Channel on technological improvements in the bathroom of the future. There was a representative from the Toto Corporation talking about their toilets, most of which include a bidet feature. He said it was the aim of the company to allow the user to enjoy all the toilet’s features without ever having to touch anything but the remote control. The thing even included warm-air dryer vents! It was pretty clear that toilet paper was considered to be a thing of the past.
Toilet paper is, in fact, a western luxury that most of the world does fine without. Especially in the Middle East where trees are few and far between. My brother once visited a wealthy man’s home in Turkey. The Master Bath was tiled in beautiful mosaics with gold-plated fixtures. And the toilet was a “bombsight” dish in the floor with water jets. On the wall was a warm water fountain for rinsing the left hand.
Most washolets I saw in Japan had a button with a “woman in a dress” icon. I’d imagine this would be the answer to your question. If you can trip the sensor you may be able to see the differences in motion of the water jet between the 2 settings. DO NOT lean close to get a better view. Lesson learned the hard way.
By the way, if you see a two-setting seat heater button, DO NOT use high! Again, lesson learned the hard way. Also if you see an orange or red button on the control panel, it’s probably the fanny blow drier. Lesson learned the startling way. [resisting urge to include joke about full-volume ass hair.]
Slight tangent, but I like regular bidets better. Much easier to soak tourist-tired feet in.
I’ve used the Toto washer/toilet seat after a bowel movement. This was a seat that would fit on any standard toilet, with a separate control panel that mounted on the wall. It had temperature, intensity and location controls (I only tested the “back” position as I’m male). It felt so much cleaner than any quantity of toilet paper. American toilet/bidet seat maker Swash is promoting these devices as being more ecologically sound - that the water and electricity used by the seat is far less than the 37 gallons of water used to produce one roll of toilet paper and the 55 million trees cut down every year to make toilet paper.
If I get a chunk of change I can spare, I really want one of these for my home.
Me too. I’m impressed with how it feels. Impressed may be the imprecise word, but “anally delighted”, while fine for the Dope in some contexts, doesn’t work here. :eek:
The air dryer? Meh. I’ve sat on close to a dozen in the last week in various locales on two different islands, and not ONE blew air sufficient to dry :eek: mah bum. Toilet paper was used. The whole " ecologically green " thing was, shall we say, flushed away.
OTOH I’m six foot two and 248 lbs with bad knees and I walked about a mile to a convenience store to use THEIR facility to avoid the squat-hole in the place I was working this week. Yes, I’m aware an awful lot of the world operates this way. I do not. I am unused to that balancing act and was not interested in learning how to do it while working, at the age of 46.
There are limits.
So how many Coke machines did you pass on your way to the store? [snicker] As a large gaijin, I commisserate. Sorta makes you wonder how the sumo handle that.
An anecdote about one of my favorite jazz saxophonists has him arriving at his hotel in Paris, mistaking the bidet for another fixture, and having to…uh…put things right using a pencil.